iTunes U

Sorry if this generates even more information overload for planners, but I think it's worthwhile.

iTunes have just launched, iTunes U, 'the campus that never sleeps'. You may have noticed it on your iTunes interface already? It's basically 100s of free lectures from some top Universities in the US. I haven't had the chance to have a good rummage, but there are a couple in there I've spotted that look interesting. Particuarly lectures from MIT's comparative media studies course. Which features the fantastic Henry Jenkins.

You can read The Guardian's article here.

Goodbye Pav

Sadly Luciano Pavarotti, the larger than life tenor passed away this week. Now I’m not claiming to be an opera fan, but I am a fan of Nessun Dorma, the song the BBC used as the theme tune for the 1990 World Cup. For anyone born around the late 70s early 80s, Italia 90 is probably the first World Cup you can vividly remember and to be honest I don’t think there has been a better one since.

So in dedication to Luciano and all England fans whose hearts were broken by the Germans in 1990, here’s a reminder.

The legend’s Nessun Dorma


David Platt scoring that volley against Belguim


Gazza crying in that game against Germany

AAAA - The culture of creativity

This is one of the best vids I've seen for a long time. Sir Ken Robinson, at the AAAA Conference, gives one of the most entertaining and inspiring speeches on creativity I've ever heard. I can't claim to have found it, Mark posted it last month. I'm surprised I've only just come across it. It's so good I had to post it on here.

Not only is it good, it made me really think about my time at school and in particular one important moment. At the time it didn't seem like such a life changing decision but looking back now I reckon it's the reason why I now work on a PC rather than a Mac. When I took my options at high school I had to choose between Art or P.E. In fact there was a group of 'creative' or 'enjoyable' subjects that you were only allowed to pick one of. My school simply wouldn't allow you to do more than one. I've know idea if this is the norm? I loved both and I reckon I was pretty good at them as well but I decided to take P.E, mostly due to the influence of my careers advisor and my Dad.

I ended up taking English, Psychology and Sport Science at A-levels, before going on to do a Marketing communications degree at Uni. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sad about it, I'm more than happy doing what I do. It just proves a few of Sir Ken's points:

1 - Creativity should have the same status as literacy
2 - We shouldn't be so afraid of making mistakes. If we're not prepared to be wrong we won't come up with anything original
3 - People don't grow into creativity we grow out of it, or get educated out of it

Book Review - Unspeak

I think words are one of the most powerful weapons a planner can use and this is an excellent book that really gets you thinking about how to use them in a different way. It's jam packed full of euphemisms, metaphors and hidden meanings.

Journalist Steven Poole analyses how governments, 'terrorist groups', religious leaders and corporations manipulate words in order to influence behaviour, thoughts and the opinions of the 'herd'. So if you like words and political debate Unspeak this is well worth reading.

The Internet killed the alien star

Image via.

To be honest I'm fairly open minded about the idea of sharing the universe with other life forms but until I see something with my own two eyes, I'm a wee bit sceptical. A recent article by Ziauddin Sardar in the New Statesman draws an interesting correlation between the reduction in UFO sightings and the development of the Internet. Yeah I know, it sounds weird. Sardar's opinion is that UFOs are merely cultural devices that allow people to explain the unexplainable: 'Instead of projecting our fears of the inexplicable on to outer space, we project them into cyberspace'. Although seemingly sightings haven't reduced by the hilarious flaming the poor guy gets from some serious UFO twitchers.

People are apparently now seeking solace in virtual worlds, online gaming, chat rooms, blogs, and forums, instead of in religion and UFOs. Sardar essentially believes the Internet has made us become self absorbed and inward looking. I'm not really convinced by his argument but there are some thought provoking opinions in there, whichis always good. You can read the full article here.

I personally believe that the Internet is anything but inward looking. It is far from being just an introspective tool, it gives people more freedom and confidence than ever before. Rather than feeling the need to seek out 'the meaning of life' perhaps people are just more comfortable with their existence and have a greater desire for self expression? It's the generation of the creators rather than the followers.

Close but no cigar

When I heard about The Filter I thought it sounded fantastic. An application that integrates with your iTunes and iPod to creates your playlists for you.

Sounds like the answer to all my dreams. Particularly seeing as I'm on my third iPod in 18 months and I can't bothered to spend hours creating playlists if they give up the ghost halfway through the year. And for the record, I'm yet to meet a genius or be given an alcoholic drink to numb the pain at Apple's so called 'genius bar'.

Essentially The Filter allows you to pick a broad criteria to be analysed, such as by track or by genre. You then click on a track on your iTunes or you iPod, click on 'create playlist' and hey presto, it generates a play list of similar tracks directly into your library. The problem is they aren't that similar.

I'm off on my hols soon so I thought I would create a nice lazy, summery playlist. So I selected Jack Johnson and let it create a list of 30 similar songs from my 5,000 strong library.

It's a bloody good job I checked because there I would have been, chilling out, lying on my sunbed, dozing off, listening to a bit of JJ. When I would have been awoken by the dulcet tones of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones singing London's Calling.

To be honest I think it's because of the inaccurate tags iTunes puts on the tracks. Jose Gonzalez is alternative punk apparently. So until I can be arsed to go through and change the genres it won't get used I'm afraid. It's almost there though.

What can we learn from Duchamp?

Now I don’t know much about art. I’m interested in it, I appreciate it and I like what I like, but I don’t know what is good or bad. So apologies if this post screams of ignorance, but after reading this about Marcel Duchamp it got me thinking about the kind of art that those of us in communications are paid to produce and what we could learn from him. Duchamp had a really interesting perspective on art and it seems pretty relevant given the debate surrounding the future of planning, agencies and the general changes in modern marketing.

This post isn’t about commercial art versus art, or intended to suggest that visual art is dead. I simply found Duchamp’s perspective thought provoking. How’s that for sitting on the fence!

Whilst Duchamp eventually came to despise retinal art and the bourgeois, he started off by wanting to create a new kind of art that engaged the mind. Duchamp wondered if he could create works of art that were not conventionally works of art. This became known as conceptual art.

According to the Oxford English dictionary a concept is: “an idea of something formed mentally, combining all its characteristics or particulars.” This suggests to me that there are many different elements to the concept and not just visual and copy. Seems obvious and straightforward. So why the debate about who owns ideas?

In my agency, concepts are the things we review. No reason why it’s called this over creative it just is and always has been. I would argue that in a ‘traditional process’ quite often what is reviewed isn’t really a concept – at least not just yet. All the other ‘characteristics’ and ‘particulars’ haven’t been developed, such as the media for arguments sakes. It’s essentially just an idea at this stage. In other words a concept can’t be CREATED without varying perspectives and input.

Duchamp’s ‘Readymades’ are also something we can learn from. He purposefully aimed to break every rule in art in order to engage people’s minds in unpredictable ways so he could provoke the observer to participate and think rather than it just being aesthetic to the eye. And to top it off he believed in art that was free of pretence and artifice. He’s a clever bloke in my book.

However, probably one of the most interesting beliefs of Duchamp is that art occurs at the juncture of the artists’ intention and the observer’s response, ultimately making them a co-creator. If ever there is something that would unite people in agencies today and describe what we should all be striving for in communications this is it. Perhaps this is the art we should get more awards for?

Dangerous Knowledge

I watched Dangerous Knowledge last night, an absolutely brilliant documentary on an increasingly good BBC Four. it's bound to be be repeated at least 20 times so keep your eyes peeled. It's planning porn and certainly stirs up a bit of quant v qual, positivist v naturalist debate.

Presenter David Malone took us on an insightful journey into the lives of four genius mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. All of them managed to create a storm up back in the day by questioning whether or not there are somethings in the world mathematics cannot know and that there will always be problems outside of human logic. Some of their personal battles with unexplainable entities such as homosexuality, religion and social oppression arguably forced them to question their own beliefs and the concept of certainty.

Tragically these guys went insane and eventually killed themselves in their quest to prove a number of theories such as infinity. Essentially they were trying to use mathematics to prove the limitations of mathematics, logic to prove logic is illogical and when they continuously looked for certainty all they found was uncertainty. All sounds enough to screw any one's head up.

Stop War

Via Worstweatherever

I love this kind of stuff. Very Banksy.

Comics are actually quite cool

I've always had an appreciation for comic books, or graphic novels - whatever you prefer to call them. Although it's more out of admiration for the artistry than anything else. To be honest, I've never really given them enough time to understand why people get so fanatical about them. Until a read this post.

It's from a presentation by Jack Schultz done at Interesting 2007. Its made me look at comics in a completely different light - they seem a lot less geeky than they did before. In fact, I would go as far as saying they're pretty cool.

Jack discusses things such as 'hypertime' and 'The bleed', which are essentially complicated storytelling techniques and manipulating the physical form of the comic to add another layer to the experience. Well worth reading, even if you aren't in to comics.

Monkey Journey to the West

I'm a big admirer of Damon Albarn, not just because I like his music, but he's always looking to do something different and challenging. Something that makes people think what the f**K is he doing now? I don't know what it is that drives him. Perhaps it's the personal challenge and the desire to prove doubters wrong? Maybe he gets bored quickly and is generally curious and excited about new things? It's probably all of them, but the thing I love, is his unwillingness to compromise.

Blur started out as a manufactured, middle England, art college, 'indy' band. Exploiting a market led by the Stone Roses, Blur unsuccessfully took on Oasis for the title of THE Britpop band of the 90s. Despite this, they were still successful and managed to shed the pretender image. It was Albarn's drive and uncompromising nature that probably annoyed their label but carved out a place for Blur as a credible British band.

Whilst never really officially leaving Blur, he moved on to a new project at arguably the height of their success. The Gorillaz, a virtual, cartoon band, created with designer/comic book artist and creator Jamie Hewlett (who went to art school in my hometown and designed the decor of a club I used to frequent. See blogging is great, you never find the interesting stuff out reading Observer Music Monthly you know) became an iconic brand with two albums, some great videos and an amazing live act where the characters were bought to life using 3D technology based on Pepper's Ghost, an old Victorian illusion based on reflecting and projecting on to mirrors.

More recent ventures include ‘The Good the Bad and the Queen’, this was the name of the album not the band, which had no name of course, very Prince and now a Chinese opera again with Jamie Hewlett (the reason for my actual post). Based on a classic Chinese novel, Monkey Journey to the West, launched at the Manchester International Festival last weekend to some rave reviews. It’s not going to be in the UK for a while as far as I’m aware which is a bit gutting, it has to do Paris and Berlin first. But fear not, the BBC has highlights of a documentary on its website that followed the duo throughout the development of the concept.

To promote the launch a Virgin train was fully Hewletted between London and Manchester. The modern trainspotter's porn!

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

We are currently in the process of developing one of the Group's brands and as seasiders we had the inevitable conversation about how we might differ to London agencies? What does this mean for our clients? How could we show them the benefits of working with an agency outside London? Trips on a tractor, the smell of manure, you know, the sort of thing you would expect from an agency outside London. Any how, during this conversation someone bought up the name of the dead Cornish painter Alfred Wallis. Wallis, an ex fisherman, turned to painting at the age of 70 after his wife died.

Painting seascapes and St Ives, the area where he lived, Wallis developed a distinctive style that had a real sense of unrestrained creativity - almost endearingly child like. Wallis for example had no preconceptions of how the sea should look, he painted it just how he saw it in his head. Self taught Wallis would use anything he could get his hands on. The scarcity of paint and canvas meant Wallis would use old tins of boat paint and scraps of cardboard to create his work. Wallis' sense of perspective and proportion wasn't conventional and based solely on his own reality and memories of decades at sea.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story of this is yet, but it's interesting nonetheless. Perhaps that's enough. No worse or better than anything else. Just a different perspective and a different attitude.

Interesting 2007

I'm actually gutted I couldn't make it to Russel's Interesting 2007, so this isn't intended to take the piss, but I can't help thinking of this Monty Python sketch.

Isle of Wight Festival - Let the children play

I haven't blogged for a few days as 1) I was at the Isle of Wight Festival and 2) I needed time to recover and catch up with work. I had an awesome time. Highlights for me were obviously the Stones, but Kasabian rocked. Snow Patrol, Keane, Groove Armada and The Thirst also put in great performances. The Isle of Wight Festival has such a different atmosphere to the likes of Reading and Glastonbury. It's definitely more family orientated and generally more laid back. However there were still plenty of people passed out around me through out the entire Stones set. You could smell weed pretty much everywhere you went and there is absolutely no chance of getting more than a couple of hours sleep and a clean toilet, so it certainly isn't a picnic in the park.

On top of being jealous of the children who probably don't realise how lucky they are yet, after all these are about as far as I got for a weekend during term time. It was great to see families doing something different together. Something that many parents probably consider to be unsafe or unacceptable to take young children to.

In The Telegraph last week, David Willetts the Conservative Shadow Education Secretary suggested that the reason Children in the UK have such poor basic skills in Mathematics and English isn't necessarily due to an inadequate education system, but because our culture is too protective of our children. Willets stated that: "Children are so cocooned by their parents that they rarely venture far from home and have little concept of space, volume and how the world actually works". Coining the term 'nature deficit disorder' the article cites research that alarmingly says the area in which children are allowed to play in by their parents is a ninth of what it was a generation ago.

Willets continued: "It is very hard to make sense of geometry if you haven't thrown a ball around or make sense of volume if you haven't messed about with water and sand or do arithmetic if you haven't collected things and arranged them." I don't often agree with much of what the Conservatives have to say, but on this I do. You can read the full article here.

20 Years of Rave

Image from PYMCA

I'm absolutely loving PYMCA (Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive) at the moment. As well as an excellent image library to use and peruse, it has had two cracking exhibition's on recently. This was England and more recently Pills, Stills and Bellyaches - 20 years of rave. Rave was probably the first musical subculture that influenced me and my circle of friends. Living near Brighton, the South Downs became an area rife with raves (and still is by the looks of things here). As organisers looked for larger spaces to hold bigger gatherings and keep events under the radar, the countryside close to London was perfect.

At the time there wasn't really any interesting subcultures to identify with. It was the point of transition from the 80s to the 90s where not much was really happening. It was unclear who was who and who was into what. Clubs and pubs were pretty uninteresting. There wasn't much live music, they weren't playing the music that certain people wanted to listen to because of its association with drugs and they had strict dress codes to supposedly keep the 'riff-raff' out, but essentially made everyone look the same. I guess you could call it a relatively boring middle England at the time.

This meant rave spilled out into warehouses and open spaces where people were free from the restrictions placed on them by mainstream culture and that's when it really took off. It became a real herd movement I suppose. The obvious illegal element attracted rebellious young people who loved the secrecy surrounding many raves. It was fuelled by unstructured mass gatherings that my generation at least had no experience of. It wasn't just about the music, in fact I prefer more of the genres it inspired rather than rave as it was back then. It was more about the social side of it, it was the feeling and the atmosphere that the music created among huge groups of people and to be honest I don't ever recall there being much trouble at raves.

On top of the music, the atmosphere, going to Sterns, hassling older mates to give us a lift and traipsing about fields, there was the whole interaction between each other that also united our group of friends. We used to spend hours of an evening copying each others tapes and weekends were spent going round the record shops listening to vinyl and getting all the latest flyers that would decorate our bedrooms. Some of which would become quite rare. So much so, people were even buying and trading them, they were a bit of a social currency. You would then have to keep the flyers of the rave and cut front covers out of them for your cassettes. Man, talking about cassettes and flyers makes me feel old.

After emerging from the acid house movement in the 80s, rave culture's association with drug fuelled space cadets with glow sticks and whistles overshadows the influence it has had on a number of other genres such as hardcore, jungle, drum and bass as well as more recognisable bands such as Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, New Order and The Stones Roses. Bands you could arguably say have then gone on to influence the likes of Oasis and Kasabian.

A visit from Tony Hart

Just for a bit of fun and to celebrate the creativity in us all, everyone in the agency were invited to exhibit their own personal art and photographic creations in the bar last week. To round things off the legend Tony Hart came in to judge the work and spend the afternoon trying to explain to people why the pictures they sent in didn't make it on to 'The Gallery'. Tony was on TV for about 50 years and so I think pretty much everyone in the agency grew up watching him on various programmes that included Vision On, Take Hart and Hart Beat. Tony's not in the greatest health, but he still has an obvious passion for the arts. Thanks Tony for a great day.

Me and Tony


and just in case you have forgotten...

The Hart Beat theme tune - "Left Bank", by Wayne Hill


The amazing adventures of Morph


Take Hart

When I grow up I want to...

Rhys Jones, the youngest person ever to climb the seven highest summits on each of the world's seven continents came into our offices last week to give us an inspirational talk and share his experiences with us. Apart from having some fascinating stories and being an excellent public speaker at the age of 20, Rhys' underlying message was: "you can do anything if you put your mind to it".

Admittedly the thought is well trodden but at least it had some context. Any how, it certainly got me thinking. I began asking whether or not planners should or could apply their skills to something more worthwhile or fulfilling? The likes of John Grant are working on 'The Green Marketing Manifesto' and Russel Davies on Interesting 2007 as an example. My intention isn't too make it sound like planners can change the world, but as good problem solvers and creative thinkers don't you ever think you could do more with your skills?

I think a planner's skills, rightly or wrongly, are much broader and transferable than they used to be and for me this is a good thing. But it also makes you wonder what else you could achieve if you put your mind and planning trade to it - even if it was just to do something personal, outside of work. I've started to create a pretty so far uncompelling list of things I would like to do over at 43 Things.

To end on a lighter note here are some of Rhys' images from everest. Some of these might put you off.

Frost bite of the eyes


Frost bit of the feet

Apparently his toes shrunk to the size of raisens and then fell off not long after.

A twoer (the amount of ladders you need to bridge the gap, a fiver was the longest)

Brooker on fashion

This article isn't exactly a new opinion on fashion, or people's desire to appear 'individual' and 'interesting', but I do love the way Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker articulates it in his own distinctive way.

"If Grazia magazine printed an article declaring it fashionable to smack yourself in the forehead with a limited-edition ball-pein hammer designed exclusively by Coleen McLoughlin, a mob would form outside your local B&Q before the ink had dried on the page. It's a mystery to me. If the whole point of fashion is to distinguish yourself from the herd, why queue up to be part of it? Am I missing something here?"

Brooker is a bit of a legend.

This is England - looking from the inside out

Image courtesy of PYMCA

I'm off to see Shane Meadows' latest film, This is England, at the weekend. If you are unfamiliar with the writer and directors previous work he's responsible for Dead Man's Shoes, Once upon a time in the Midlands and 24/7. This is England is a movie about the British skinhead movement in the 80s. Loosely auto biographical, the movie is based on the life of a troubled, working class boy from the Midlands who seeks refuge with a group of 'Skins'.

The movie touches on a number of interesting areas such as youth culture, Ska, social marginalisation, identity, racism and politics. Now I was born in 1980, so I don't really recall much of this movement, apart from the occasional menacing looking types, a couple of which happened to be my babysitter and her boyfriend. However, only since the movie has come out have I bothered to look into it in more detail - I like The Specials and a bit of Madness but that's it really. I'm fascinated with how it all started and evolved over time but I've mostly been surprised with how my original, mostly negative perceptions have been formed by the minority that turned it into the racist movement that my generation at least see it as.

Newsnight recently discussed this film and Mark Kermode made a cracking point when debating with Sunday Times columnist Peter Whittle. In response to the pompous and out of touch, Whittle, Kermode stated that people always tend to look at cultures from the outside and fail to truly understand them. As much as we hate to admit it, I think the majority of us working in communications continue to do this, merely scratching the surface of what's out there. Even those of us in research do it with tired methodologies . I think this is why I'm becoming more and more interested in ethnography. It might not go down well with a positivist but I think I'm finding my work more interesting.

The full Newsnight - This is England debate

Even ruddy CRM guff can sound nice

I signed up to E4's newsletter the other day and this standard confirmation came through. These days I sign up to so many things I rarely bother to read emails like this, but it did catch my eye. E4's attention to detail on even the most boring part of CRM is awesome. Have a bloody good read.

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Ever since Paul Feldwick's Poetry and Planning evening I've tried to pay close attention to how brands use language and I'm yet to see one that doesn't just do it so well, but also so consistently. A round of applause for E4.